SIR KEIR STARMER is overseeing social cleansing in his constituency, the independent left candidate challenging the Labour leader in the general election said at the weekend.

Andrew Feinstein, the South African former ANC MP fighting to unseat the Labour leader in Holborn and St Pancras, held a rally in front of the office block outside which Camden council, the local authority, had just evicted homeless people in favour of large potted plants.

“Keir Starmer, the Labour Party and the council think they can push out human beings and replace them with bike racks and plants,” he told a rally of his supporters.

Speaking in a Gotham-style canyon of new office blocks behind King’s Cross station, the broadly supported independent candidate slammed the council for permitting “all this office space when the constituency is crying out for social housing, affordable housing.”

Mr Feinstein accused the authority, headed by Georgia Gould, a Sir Keir favourite now imposed on a neighbouring safe Labour seat, of “putting the needs of the super-wealthy and mega-corporations before the needs” of local people.

He pointed out that it had earlier “on one of the coldest nights of the year” removed the tens of homeless people in another part of the borough.

He called on voters to “get rid of the Tories and also get rid of the Tory-lite leader of the Labour Party, Keir Starmer.”

Mr Feinstein’s campaign, launched just a day before the election was called, has already won strong support from local Muslims and from the diverse working-class community around Queen’s Crescent in the north of the seat.

Its mission of taking on the Labour leader has also been backed by hundreds of volunteers which the campaign is presently trying to organise to best effect.